Kavan

There seems to be a constant stream of questions about Rawr.Mage that are a result of not using the tool correctly. Hopefully this thread will be of help to those seeking answers related to Rawr.Mage. This thread will be dedicated mostly to the use of the tool and is not meant to be a place for reporting bugs.

That said, let's start at the beginning.

Rawr.Mage is a module for Rawr which can answer several theorycrafting questions related to mages.

You can download the program from Rawr - Home

There is a thread here dedicated for any general Rawr questions not specific to the mage module: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t21713-r...eased_11_27_a/

If you have a bug to report, please utilise the bug reporting tools at Rawr - Issue Tracker

A lot of questions are answered in the Rawr.Mage wiki, so if you haven't read it, please take a loot at Rawr - Home. There are some questions that aren't answered there and these I'll try to answer here. I'll start with some common questions, the rest will come as a result of further discussion in the thread.


Why does Rawr.Mage value int and mana regen so high?

There is a very good chance that you have not set up Rawr properly. If you haven't yet, I advise you again to look at the Rawr.Mage wiki. The most common reason for this problem is that you forgot to select buffs. If you are sure that you selected everything correctly then most likely this means you have actually specified fight conditions where you are mana starved. Rawr.Mage optimizes total damage done given the fight parameters and it will utilize whatever means it has. With default settings it will try to compensate with potions, gems, evocation, less mana intensive rotations. It will not optimize your talents, so it might be possible that a better alternative to regemming your gear is changing your spec for a particual encounter if you've indeed modeled it correctly. If you've tried everything and it still doesn't make sense as a last resort there is an option under fight parameters to assume unlimited mana. This however will do exactly what it says and don't be surprised when it says to use molten armor and when you try that in practice you run out of mana.


How to use Rawr.Mage in combination with WWS reports to improve your game play?

This answer is adapted from a guide I made preexpansion so some things might be out of date.

First thing you should get from a WWS report is the fight length which you can get at the top after the date and enter that in options under Fight tab. Next look at your external mana regen. If you received Mana Tide or Innervate you can enter that on "Spells & Buffs" tab and you can specify Replenishment and Judgement of Wisdom under Buffs.

Next thing to look at is your dps time. In WWS you'll have a line like this:

Dmg. Out to foes : 1,161,580 (13 %) to friends: 0 DPS time : 12'30'' (69 % of presence) DPS : 1548

Your dps time in this case would be 0.69. There are a few things to keep in mind here. The way WWS computes this is to divide the whole fight in 5 second intervals and in each interval if you did any damage they mark you as dps active in that interval. Number of intervals in which you did damage over total number of intervals would then be your dps time. Especially for fire specs you have to be careful as dots will skew this number. For Rawr.Mage the dps time is time where you were able to cast at mob, i.e. not running around moving out of fire. So you have to be careful to identify how much of downtime was due to environmental/fight requirements and how much was due to you being slow switching targets. This is best done comparing to another player of same spec to see if you're too low. Main reason why this can be low is due to slow targetting, being slow in reacting to events and similar. When you run out of fire it's important to do it fast and clean and get back to dps as soon as possible without wasting time on turning around.

Next thing to find out, which is almost the most important I think, is to figure out how much effective latency you have. Look at your tooltip in game to see the cast time of your spells after haste (or check in Rawr). Now go to WWS and click on browse log file. This will give you a list of all damage events you did. Take a large stretch where you're chaincasting and look how much time it took you to cast them. It's important to take a large stretch since there are quite some fluctuations in individual casts due to how combat log works. Now divide this total time by number of casts you did and compare to the tooltip cast time. The difference between the two is effective latency which you can enter in Rawr under Spells & Buffs. The default there is 0.05 second which is very low. Anything from 0.1-0.2 would still be considered normal. If it is anything more than that then you have serious trouble. This is called not pressing the button enough. Try some new casting methods, get some cast bar latency mods.

Now you should have all the fight parameters set in Rawr and be able to compare your raid performance with optimum possible for your gear/spec.

Go to Stats tab in Rawr and check the Solution and Spell Info panel. If you look at Abilities in WWS you have a list of all spells you cast including average damage, number of casts, crits, misses and so on. A large reason for variation is crit percentage. This is random and not under your control. Compare crit% in WWS with crit% in Spell Info for all the spells. If there is a difference here then you should take this into account when evaluating your performance. This can be for better or for worse. Similar to crit is miss. This is also completely random and not under your control.
Again at the end is mitigated% which is the partial resists. On average it should be around 6%, but WWS does not compute this accurately so it'll more often show figures around 4-5%.

Now it's time to look at your spell selection. If you mouse over spell cycles in Rawr you'll see a breakdown of which cooldowns should be ideally used with each other and with which spell. You also have a breakdown by spell which will show you how much damage should come from each spell and number of times each should be cast. This is especially useful to compare with the total column in WWS. For number of hits be careful because WWS only shows number of non-crits. To get number of all casts in WWS expand the Columns button and in first "Nb" row check Crit and All Miss. Hits + Crit + Miss = number of all casts. If this doesn't match with Rawr that could be because you entered wrong dps time or latency. If could also be because you used a bad mix of spells or bad ratio between them. If number of casts match you can still have a missmatch in damage which can be caused by ineffective use of cooldowns.

First thing to check is mana pots/mana gems and evocation and compare with WWS. Did you use more than necessary or not enough? Did you evocate when you shouldn't? Did you use haste potion when you should have used mana potion? In WWS you'll see this under Gains, Buffs & Debuffs.

Next you should check your use of activatable effects and talents. First thing to check is how many times you used them. You can see this in WWS again under buffs gained. Compare it to suggested number of uses in Rawr and figure out what you did wrong. Did you forget to use a trinket? Should you be desyncing your 2 min cooldowns from 3 min cooldowns or not?

Finally you should check if you're using cooldowns effectively and pair them correctly. To check this in WWS you have to click on browse log file and for filter select "Both". Look for lines like:

45141 20:57'45.076 Kavan gains aura Mojo Madness
45142 20:57'45.076 Kavan gains aura Arcane Power
45143 20:57'45.076 Kavan gains aura Icy Veins

Compare this with pairings that Rawr is suggesting. Are you using Icy Veins with Heroism when you should have desynced it? Are you using comustion at the right time? Which trinket did you use with Arcane Power?

To get more accurate results in Rawr you can go to Advanced tab, enable Global Optimizations, check Segment Cooldowns and Integral Mana Consumables for Display (not for Comparison) and enable Reconstruct Sequence. If it takes a long time and you get a message box that under the computation limit it wasn't able to find a solution then you can either increase the limit (not more than 1000-1500) or change SMP Search Method to DepthFirst. After you've done this the cooldown pairings will be more accurate and you can also check the Sequence which will show you the complete timeline of when you should have used the cooldowns.

 

Azirth

Thanks for this heads up on Rawr. I planned on using it to get ep values throughout gear levels here soon, and i was kind of hesitant due to not knowing the way it works, or at least not knowing this much on how it works.

 

dralarn

Thank you for setting up this post. I also think it is much needed.

At the time of this post, I have the latest version of RAWR - 2.1.2. I would like to filter out 10 and 25 man raid gear from the results, so I can determine the best possible upgrades I can acquire through crafting and heroics. However, my gear filter in the top, right of RAWR still shows only BC instances and raids, and doesn't seem to provide WOTLK options yet. I just want to confirm if everyone else is experiencing this as well, or if there is a problem with my item cache.

Thanks!

 

Allecto

I downloaded and used Rawr for the first time over the TDay break and loved it. However, I typically play on a Mac, and was wondering if another version or similar program is available for the mac.

 

• Theras

Apparently you need to have Mono to run Rawr on a Mac. Why you'd want to get a kissing disease is beyond me, but you Mac people have always struck me as a little weird.

 

Roywyn

I'd like to add a few notes on mechanics:

4/5 Frostfire Garb
You model it like a 5% CSD meta. Testing in beta showed however that works like 5% Spell Power/Ice Shards/Burnout.
It also stacks additively with those talents.
Thus, it's currently overvalued by a factor 5-6.

Demonic Pact
Currently increases magic damage done by 10% in Rawr.
It's actual behaviour in game is that increases raid wide spell power by 10% of the casting warlock's spell power without DP/FTTotem/ToW/IDS (likely intended) and without the spell power from the spirit part of Fel Armour (probably a bug).

Rune of Razorice
It might make sense to add this as raid-wide 5% frost damage debuff. It stacks with everything.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Xeddicus

Rawr's filters don't seem to have been updated for WotLK yet, all the gear for the expansion is under the "Other" category for now it seems.

 

Toshimo

You can use the following updated files for Rawr.Mage:

Wrath-updated Mage-only item cache
Wrath-updated item filters

Also, I've been meaning to let them know that the [Illustration of the Dragon Soul] is not parsing currently.

 

enthrop

Sorry, I'm one of the ones new to Rawr.. what does this mean? Does it mean I have to mimic the 4/5 set bonus and that Rawr won't do it automatically, or that it does do it automatically and this is how it calculates the bonus?

And does rawr take into account 2/4 set bonus and use mana gem for it?

Also, I've posted this in one of the other threads here.. but it's my understanding that the current version of Rawr takes into account the FFB ghost hit. A quick look at my Rawr seems to confirm that as it optimizes gear at a 11% hit rate. Is there a way to not do that? I want to target 14%...

 

dralarn

Thanks! This was very helpful. I just replaced the old xml files and used 'Tools > Update Item Cache' to get locations for the gear and was able to filter out raid gear accordingly.

 

Wizeowel

Rawr optimises for maximum dps, it doesn't look at hit rating separately, only as part of the total calculation. Since Pyro LB and Scorch are a smaller proportion of your total dps than FFB, extra hit above 11% isn't as valuable as other stats.

However, if you really want to ignore this good advice, you can set the optimiser to require hit rating by using the 'Add' button under 'Additional Requirements' in the optimiser. Choose 'Hit Rating' from the dropdown menu and set the value to 367 (14% hit chance).

 

colonp

In the Buffs section, one choice is Amplify Magic (target). Am I missing a super valuable mage spell, or is this just for bosses you can MC, like Razorgore?

 

Carnivean

Thanks mate it's appreciated.
[Illustration of the Dragon Soul] can be modeled as a straight 260 Spelldmg trinket. You can edit it manually in like 10 seconds, so it isn't a big problem. Additionally it should be pretty clear, that it is by far the best caster dps trinket in the game right now.

 

Chira

The 4/5 Frostfire Garb and Illustration parsing were fixed in revision 24534. You can go to the source panel and download and compile that (or any revision) easily with Microsoft Visual C# Express (freeware). It works right out of the box, you just load the project file and build it. The project files are placed in the "bin/Debug" folder in the source directory. You may want to copy over the item xml files from your last release to maintain those.

 

Kavan

Some of the questions were already answered so I won't repeat those.

I'll bring this up with the team as it affects all models.

This is fixed for the next release.

Rawr will take into account the set bonus and will use the mana gems to activate it and appropriately stack it with other abilities. In the 2.1.2 release the 2 set bonus is not modeled correctly (it's valued too high), but it's fixed for next release.

This buff is intended for healer modules, their targets are raid players.

 

◊ Kyth

I wasn't able to get it to work given the instructions on the site.

Officer of <Fusion>
http://www.stratfu.com/ - StratFu: Strategies, Guides, Movies, and Tips for Wrath Raiding

 

Albos

I had the same trouble but found a few instructions on another site to get Rawr to work on a mac with mono.

1) Install Mono (http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html) for Mac OS X.

2) Unzip Rawr.

3) Open the Terminal, navigate to where you unzipped Rawr, and type 'mono Rawr.exe', and hit enter. That should launch Rawr for you.

I hope this will help you out, but i do warn you that it is very slow and fragile on Mac.

 

The Stonemender

For some reason the dps-calculation does not include scorch. As scorch is needed to be maintained by during bossfights i think it should be included somewhere.

 

Maledict

There is a tick box under the advanced options that says "Maintain scorch". I fyou tick that, it assumes you are keeping scorch up yourself and your DPS is lowered accordingly.

 

zetrac

I have search a bit and could not found my answer
is it possible to have rawr calculate scaling factor for hit/sp/crit/haste for a given build and stuff setup ?

 

enthrop

Do you mean something like... 10 crit = 5 dps, 10 haste = 4.5 dps, etc?

If so, on the right side.... click "Chart" -- "Item Budget" (you might have to scroll down).

That's show you how much dps each 'set' of stat contributes.

 

Kavan

This is a common theme that frequently shows up. While Rawr.Mage gives an answer to this in the Item Budget graph, I think this is not the right way to look at upgrades.

There are essentially two ways how to handle upgrades. One way is to look at all available gear, create the ultimate set and then work your way towards it. Another approach is to look at upgrades in a progressive manner, looking at which items make the greatest improvement over your current item set. I think ultimately the best way is to combine both of these and I'll provide some information about how you can use Rawr to search for progressive upgrades.

There is an important problem that one can overlook when search for upgrades. This is the problem of looking at one particular fight setting and trying to make generalizations to different fight conditions. The way I'm using Rawr is I have rawr character profiles for different fight conditions that are common in raiding. Different fight lengths, different combinations of raid buffs, special fights including resists and similar. You don't need to cover every possible situation, just what is common in your everyday raiding.

After you have all fight conditions set up you should mark all items that you have available (i.e. in your inventory). I would suggest that you mark only the specific gemming that you're using currently (you do this with control-clicking the diamond so that it turns blue as opposed to green) and select the current enchant on the item (right click the diamond and select the enchant). This will be helpful for progressive upgrades unless you plan to regem everything whenever you get a new item. You can still look at how to best regem your gear when you set it up this way by checking Override Regem option in the optimizer.

Now the questions is, given these fight conditions and current available items, how do you determine which gear will give you the best upgrade overall over all fight conditions.

To answer this question you have the Batch Tools available from the Tools menu. First thing you should do is load all fight settings you created. You can either do File->Import and select all character profile files or add them individually by clicking on the ... button. You can save the set of fight conditions with File->Save so that you can reuse it later.

This should give you a list of characters for different fight conditions with a score for each. You will see a column called Weight. You can use this to adjust relative importance of different fight conditions. For example if you don't want the resist fight have much importance, but still take it into account, you lower its weight. You can quickly switch between different profiles by clicking on the Show button.

Let's look at the tools that are available. First we have Set Available Items. This will copy the items marked available in the currently open character to all profilese in the batch list. So you don't have to make changes in each profile, you just make it in one of them and then set it for all.

The main tools are Optimize and Build Upgrade List. Optimize is the equivalent of optimizing each individual profile. When you do this any profile that finds an improvement will be marked with a * and a value of new score will be displayed in its column. After optimization is complete you can either save all new profiles with Save Characters or use Save Characters as Copy to leave the current profiles intact and save the optimized ones in a separate xml file.

Finally let's look at what we initially set out to do. For build upgrade list I suggest setting thoroughness to minimum and disabling regem/reenchant overrides. The batch version of Build Upgrade List is distinct in the way it evaluates gear. It won't create separate upgrade lists for each fight condition, instead it will look at upgrades and see how much of an upgrade it provides for each of them and compute a weighted average using the specified weight.

What this means is that even though for a very long fight it might be good to think about mana regen, it will be balanced against other fight conditions so on a overall very good item it will use gems that are good overall. At the same time it will be able to point out potential sidegrades. If one item is very good in a specific fight condition, it will realize that and suggest gemming and enchant that is in line with that. You can also use this to find a new purpose for items that you replaced. For example they might fit well to fill the niche when you have to gear for when you don't have draenei aura in the group. Similarly look at items that you have available as there might be a gemming option available that is better overall than what you're currently using.

Last just a note on how to keep such a setup updated once you get new gear. First decide how to gem and enchant the gear and then make appropriate changes in which items you have marked as available. If you regemmed/reenchanted some item that you were using in some of the profiles you can use the Replace Unavailable option. This will look through your profiles and look for items that are no longer marked as available and replace them with a gemming combination that is now available. Finally you run the optimize and update your ingame item sets.

 

Kehly

Has anyone been able to locate a tick or option to add Darkglow Embroidery to cloak?

 

Baruk

As some profession buffs have already been implemeted: could you please add alchemists Mixology ?

Per Aspera ad Astra

 

The Stonemender

EDIT: Never mind. Didnt Check out 2.1.4. Filtering is fine now.

Bug: Cincture of Polarity is listed twice in 'comparisons' giving 211.43 dps and 190.01 dps (no gems in CoP).